Meanwhile a statement in Affirmation of the Catholic
Church’s Teaching on the Gift of Sexuality, was published at the
Catholic University of America in Washington DC also.

Among its approximately 500 signatories is former Prof of Moral Theology at St Patrick’s, College, Maynooth, Fr Vincent Twomey.

Other Irish-based signatories include Dr Mary
McCaughey of the Priory Institute, Dublin, Geraldine McSweeney,
Dublin-based President of the International Catholic Committee of Nurses
and Medico-Social Assistants and Dr William A Thomas, professor of Theology/Mariology at Newman CollegeIreland.

Prohibition

The Scholars’s Statement says that the church ban on
contraceptives for family planning “is based on the belief that the
biological “laws of conception” show that each and every act of sexual
intercourse has procreation as their natural “finality” and
“significance”.

But “the vast majority of acts of sexual intercourse do
not have the biological ‘capacity’ for procreation, and therefore they
cannot have procreation as their ‘finality’ or ‘significance’,” it says.

It continues that “the Bible identifies a variety of
morally worthy non-conceptive motives for engaging in sexual
intercourse,” and that contraceptives “can facilitate one or more of
sexual intercourse’s non-conceptive meanings”.

In their “Affirmation” academics defending church
teaching say they “hold that the church’s teaching on contraception is
true and defensible on the basis of scripture and reason”.

Fr Twomey said arguments presented by the Scholars’
Statement had “long since been dealt with by serious theology”.

Over the
past 40 years there had been “major developments in the area of natural
family planning as a means of birth control and the means to achieve
it,” he said.